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Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1150 by leeghoofd @ 2014-07-22

Gigabyte continues to release new products in their orange themed overclocking motherboard series. The first of the OC series was the immaculate X58 OC motherboard, a trimmed down on features board, however purely designed to provide the ultimate overclocking experience. Sadly the X58 OC board arrived just a tad too late on the market to become a major selling product. Nevertheless a trend was set: deliver affordable, yet customized for maximum tweaking potential motherboard series. Other brands had similar overclocking friendly boards yet retailing at far more elevated prices. The predecessor, the Z87X-OC was one of the most utilized overclocking boards during the last year according statistics expert Massman from HWBot.org. Gigabyte had to live up to its name and make the Z97X-SOC FORCE as good or preferably even better…

Stock 2D Results

In our 2D test suite we can discover how well the BIOS team did their job in making this board compatible and efficient with our test hardware. Normally there's not much to explore when comparing motherboards of the same chipset. Okay this is Z97 now, but performance wise there's no big step forward from Z87, besides the added support for SATA Express or M.2 support. Secondly the CPU used here is still our loyal 4770K processor, alike the Vengeance Pro 2400C10 Corsair memory kit.

The Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE board is right there playing with the big boys; not a surprise as this board has to trade places with one of the most popular Z87 OCing boards, the Z87X OC board, of course also from Gigabyte. All boards in the charts besides the ASRock and the Intel DZ87KLT board are using the 39X multiplier locked on all the cores. In single threaded results the output won't matter much, though in multi threaded ones, alike WPrime, the differences are quite noticeable.

In Maxon's Cinebench R11 we see a difference in the OpenGL test between the Z97 chipset based motherboards and the previously tested Z87 ones. CPU wise the outputs remain within the margin of error; again the latter is quite expected behaviour so not much to see here sadly...

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